“Somerton Man Mystery ‘Solved’ As DNA Points to Man’s Identity, Professor Claims”, 2022-07-26 (; backlinks):
A professor who has dedicated decades to solving one of Australia’s most enduring mysteries claims he has discovered the identity of the Somerton man. Derek Abbott, from the University of Adelaide, says the body of a man found on one of the city’s beaches in 1948 belonged to Carl “Charles” Webb, an electrical engineer and instrument maker born in Melbourne in 1905.
…in the end, Abbott, a professor in the Adelaide University School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, claims it was strands of the man’s hair trapped in a plaster “death” mask made by police in the late 1940s that provided him with what he says is proof of the man’s identity.
Police gave Abbott strands of the hair a decade ago as he continued what had become a personal quest to solve the Somerton man mystery. The hair was examined for years by a team of DNA experts at the University of Adelaide, who provided the DNA information that allowed Abbott and Fitzpatrick to further narrow the field.
By March, Abbott said he had already established Webb’s name through years of painstaking work with Fitzpatrick to build a complex family tree of around 4,000 names that led to Webb, whose date of death had not been recorded. “By filling out this tree, we managed to find a first cousin 3× removed on his mother’s side”, said Abbott. And on July 23, they matched DNA obtained from the hair to DNA tests taken by Webb’s distant relatives.